


her own way

by hobohairedbuckybear



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, oneshots for days, raylan is still raylan, willa givens is just as cool as you would expect
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23729737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobohairedbuckybear/pseuds/hobohairedbuckybear
Summary: A (potential) series of oneshots about Deputy U.S. Marshal Givens....Just not the one you’re expecting.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	1. father's daughter

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, originally, I thought I was going to have to do some weird crossover ridiculousness to make the words work together in a cohesive manner. But then the feels were stubborn enough, and started weaving into some sort of story, that I decided to pull on that string to see what comes out. 
> 
> There will likely not be any lengthy multi-chapter action. This is just a series of non-cohesive, non-chronological oneshots about what I think Deputy U.S Marshal Willa Givens would be like, and deal with, as a result of carrying the Givens’ legacy. Good, bad, and otherwise.
> 
> There are probably some breaches in canon, me being terrified at ruining a perfectly good Raylan, probably some flights of fancy, and a lack of anyone editing this for me. Please don’t hate me. I just love Raylan a lot. And I have many Feels about what a world would be like with Willa Givens wandering around with that star, and a Raylan who is too restless to really comprehend the word retired. Not to mention a Winona who loves them both in different ways, for better or for worse.

The only number she can think to call in that moment; burner phone in hand full of contacts enough to keep a court busy for a year or more, is the last one that she should. At least logically. Not that any of this is a purely logical situation that she has managed to find herself in. She had a Chief, any number of coworkers, hell even just 9-1-1 was probably the better option – current state and the gunshot or two considered. But with unsteady, bloodied fingers on the phone taken from the hands of the man who’d put her in this unfortunate situation, she dials anyways.

It takes approximately two rings – an infinite amount of time passing between each one, before she can let out the breath she has been holding, and familiar tired voice picks up.

“Willa?”

“Dad?” she whispers, dragging herself upright to rest against the weather-worn wood wall. She tries to swallow the grimace that escapes from another flair of pain that rolls through her entire frame. It hardly works. 

“ _Sweetheart_ , what’s going on? Where are you?”

Her eyes dart around the warehouse, and up at one of the rusted-out holes in the roof that she had found herself starting out of on more than one occasion during this whole _Thing_. She laughs out loud, and then immediately winces in pained regret.

“Tell you if I knew. I uhh…got myself into a _Situation_. Not the good kind.”

“Talk me through what you see.”

Willa breathes in once, catching a glimpse of the moon hovering near one of the openings in the roof. It shines enough light down to highlight the gravity of her present situation, and the pool of blood that is starting to form in new places where her clothes have not already reached their maximum rate of absorption from days prior.

“I’m sorry, Dad. Can you tell mom I’m sorry too? _I’m so sorry_ ,” she gasps, the weight of days of captivity and the nagging heaviness of the blood-loss, collecting on her all at once.

“Willa Givens,” he barks, “You just stop right there. You hear me….I need you to focus.”

“It’s bad, Dad. _It’s really bad_ ,” she whimpers, wiping away tears with her forearm to keep from wiping any more blood across her face. Willa sucks in a deep breath and presses a hand over the hole in her abdomen while trying not to think of the other one she managed to acquire in the struggle.

“It’s a warehouse. Shitty one at that. Big holes in the roof. We drove for…an hour or two, outside the city. I haven’t heard any traffic save these guys coming in and out. They’re not gonna be a problem anymore though. Not sure about any friends they might have.”

“Ok. Alright, you just…we’re just gonna keep talkin’ ok? You and me. How’s that sound?”

“Ok.”

“Ok,” he repeats, a subtle tap-tap-tap of a smartphone keyboard barely audible over the line.

* * *

They both make good time, getting from one state to another to find themselves sitting in the same hospital waiting room. The first time, the doctor doesn’t have much to say. He comes back later with more news, but it’s still not much of anything. Too soon to tell is all they get, and they settle into relatively familiar silence in the private room – a Marshal stationed outside the door to keep watch. Chief’s orders, he’d told them, whatever they needed. Raylan doesn’t know if it’s because of his reputation, or hers, but he’s not apt to question it. He’s too tired and wound up all at once to much care.

“I used to get so pissed off that she would _always_ call you first. Every goddamn time. Punched a boy in middle school for being mean to her friend. ‘ _Please don’t call my momma_ ,’ she told the Principal. Like I was gonna be the bad guy,” she finally breathes from behind her forth cup of hospital-grade coffee. She lets out an almost delirious snort of laughter. It is the first time in hours, Raylan thinks, that she has said a word. Or at least since the last time a doctor had come out with some news and that feels like an eternity ago at best.

“It never made any sense to me, Raylan. How many kids are going to do some stupid shit, and then call their Deputy U.S. Marshal father to bail them out, over their own _mother_?”

Raylan manages something like a smirk, blowing out a deep breath. 

“I’m real glad she called you first on this one, Raylan. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d…if I’d taken that call,” she whispers, setting the coffee down. Winona looks up with the first real sign of emotion that she’s had this entire time.

“I know I never handled her joining the Marshals real well. And I said any number of things to you that…were uncalled for.”

“Winona,” he sighs.

“No, Raylan. Let me finish. I was wrong. I was wrong, and you never should have let me say those things to you. She’s not a little girl anymore. She wasn’t then either, though I wanted her to be. And we both damn well know that it wouldn’t have mattered if you or I had said anything at all to stop her, she still would have done it. I should have been proud. I should have made sure she knew I was so proud of her.”

He drags himself up from the spot in the small waiting room where he’s been mostly planted, when not pacing the hallways waiting for something. Winona is fully entitled to push him away - long with a different last name, husband and a set of twins with a different father than Willa, when he sits in the chair beside her, but she doesn’t. And it is not altogether unexpected that she falls apart finally.

“She’s gonna be ok, Winona.”

“You don’t know that, Raylan. You heard that doctor as well as I did,” she manages between choked sobs.

“I do know. I’m an expert. Because for every part of her that you curse for being mine _,_ there’s just a little bit more Winona in there to balance it all back out. And that’s a whole helleva lot of stubborn for one person to have to carry around.”

It earns him a strangled laugh against his shoulder, at least. And something muttered about him being an asshole as she holds onto him. 

“You really think she’s gonna be ok, Raylan?” she finally asks, looking him in the eyes the way she used to. Back when he was too stupid to realize what he was letting slip through his fingers.

“She’s gonna be fine, Winona. Probably gonna wake up all sorts of pissed, so. I’ll handle that part. You be the worried mom, so I can keep looking like the calm and collected dad she thinks I am,” he relents.

“And just for the record, she only ever called me because she didn’t want to disappoint you. As the foremost expert in this world on disappointing you, I can’t say I rightly blame her.”


	2. boyd’s question (a moment with raylan)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> boyd had asked him a question once, about fatherhood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright, another weekend with justified and I finally put down some more words. errors are my own. so too is my unbiased love of raylan and willa's fictional relationship.

Boyd asked him once, back somewhere between the time Art took a bullet and he finally left for Florida, if being a father had changed anything. Truth is Raylan spends years trying to pretend that she does not change anything at all. Except it is a god-awful lie. And everyone sees through it. Winona mostly. 

It changes the way he draws his weapon. It changes what runs through his mind when someone draws a weapon in his direction. It changes what he keeps in the two bedroom apartment – the food, the toys, the coat of paint in the room with the little sign that Gutterson had given her for her birthday: her name printed next to a US Marshal logo. A joke of course, but it hung there from the time she could barely walk until the day she proclaimed it had to come with her to her dorm room. 

But it is that moment when she comes clean; a recently shaved head and an acceptance letter to training in Glynco, that he feels the weight of that change fully. When she plucks the hat off his head, and sets it on her own, and leans heavy against his side and asks him to trust her.

“Is there anything I can say to convince you to reconsider Willa?” he asks her, as she tips the hat low over her face and they both sit there on the patio with the familiar ocean breeze.

“Are you going to tell mom?”

“Nope. I’m going to leave that one to you. Though I’m not entirely sure what she is going to take worse – that you want to be a Marshal or that you _shaved your head_.”

She grins under the hat.

“No Dad. There is not one damn thing you can say to change my mind,” she finally relents, turning to face him and shoving the hat up so she can look him in the eyes.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought. I mean a lot. And I know I might not even get through training. And I know if I do, that it’s not easy. And maybe I’ll regret it one day, but I think you know that this was all I was ever gonna do. I have to at least try, if they’re going to give me a chance.”

He sighs loudly. Obviously. She elbows him gently.

“Your mother is going to have me murdered, you know?”

“It was my choice.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he tells her, swooping into take the hat back. He quietly takes a moment to get it resettled. 

“Just remember that when she murders me, this was your doing. Hundred of criminals. A dozen states or more where I could have been killed. But it will be the fact you did the exact thing you promised her you wouldn't, that is going to be my undoing.”

"She'll get over it. Or...she'll figure it out. We'll get through it together, is what I really mean, like the weird messed up family that we are."


	3. our little secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the trips to the gun range were something that winona was never supposed to know about.

She is somewhere around twelve the first time he all but sneaks her to the gun range. It is a long-promised birthday present, and it was supposed to be their little secret. And it was, for most of her teenage years. Willa can certifiably admit that some of those evenings or weekends at the range she was likely not supposed to be in, were some of the best times in their childhood. 

There was very little she couldn’t talk to him about in between sets. Her first broken heart. The biggest disappointments and the best moments that came with childhood and teenage years, all shared over ammunition and guns that he kept in the gun safe in his closet. Her best targets went into his phone’s images folder, and stayed there until it yelled at him to clear the memory (then she’d saved them in the cloud.) 

Winona had known, she’d come to find out later. Some months after the fight about the shaved head and the plane ticket to Georgia. But the fact she’d let it play out as something to be shared between father and daughter spoke volumes about the relationship her mom and dad had – even being as ex as they were and always had been for the entirety of her existence.

* * *

“Done this once or twice, I see Givens,” the instructor mutters, looking over the satisfactorily tight grouping on the target. She had not done as well as she had hoped, but compared to some of her fellow classmates, it would do for now. 

“I’ve seen it done better once or twice, if that’s what you mean ma’am.”

The instructor shakes her head and makes a mark on the paper in her hand before moving on to the next person. 

“Good thing we’re going to do again then, huh?”

Willa nods with a grin before repositioning her headset, and removes the target – quick to replace it with a fresh one from the pile.


End file.
